How To Deal With Chronic Complainers, by Guy Winch, Ph.D.

How To Deal With Chronic Complainers, by Guy Winch, Ph.D.

(Link): How to Deal with Chronic Complainers, by Guy Winch Ph.D.

Excerpts:

What they want and what they need are very different things.

….Understanding what Chronic Complainers Don’t Want

Most chronic complainers truly see their lives as full of hardship and challenge. (Some people’s lives are full of hardship or tragedy, but I refer here to people whose lives are actually not unusual in that regard).

Chronic complainers’ perceptions about their hardships are deeply embedded in their personality and sense of identity.

Therefore, although they tell others about their problems all the time, they are not really looking for advice or solutions.

 Even when your advice would actually resolve a problem, chronic complainers will not be especially happy to hear it: Anything that takes away some recognition of their “hardship” will be experienced as threatening to their identity and even their sense of self.

Therefore, they often respond to sound advice either by explaining why the suggestions won’t work or by becoming upset that the person offering it doesn’t understand how unsolvable their problem actually is.

Setting boundaries repels bad people. If you're learning to set better boundaries, and you tell someone "no," and they storm off in a huff, it's a success! It means you successfully filtered out a baddie. If you're not used to it, this rejection can feel like a failure. It's not!

— Satan Sandwich – KPSS (@aSatanSandwich) January 20, 2023

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